At eight in the evening, Lovely calls. “Our expert couldn’t do much,” she says. “You can hear some of what Sedgwick says, but that’s it. The bad news is that it does sound like Sedgwick is saying, ‘Ian will handle it.’”
“We don’t know the context. Anyway, let’s get someone other than your IT person to enhance this tape. She might be good, but she’s not an expert.”
“We contacted someone Lou used in a trial a couple of years ago, Ezekiel Bauman. Tops in the business. He says it’s a third- or fourth-generation version, so there’s nothing more that can be done. Bad luck. This whole fucking case feels like bad luck.”
“We’ll find someone else.”
“There’s no one better. I looked on the Internet and LexisNexis, and all roads lead to Bauman. I’m sorry, Parker.”
“Call your office and have someone bring the tape to Romulo at The Barrista. Right away.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“If it works, I’ll tell you. Just get Romulo that tape.”
After we hang up, I carefully consider whether I should make this next move. There are people who could help me, but they might refuse, might not be in the country much less close enough to LA to examine the tape recording before the trial ends. But there’s no choice. While the tape might convict my father, it’s the only thing that might save him.
I use my smart phone to e-mail my former client, a reclusive video-game designer and computer genius known to the world only as Poniard. An hour later, I get a reply saying I should be at The Barrista at precisely 12:07 tomorrow morning, which I consider later tonight. My ex-client has an annoying fondness for offbeat drama—perfect for a designer of fantastic, violent video games, but not so comforting to someone like me, who’s looking for a reliable ally.
I wait in the darkness at my usual table. There’s a comforting eeriness to The Barrista after closing time. The wooden chairs and stools are stacked upside down; the mephitic smell of ammonia from the wet mops contends with the sharp-tangy fragrance of arabica beans. I welcome the clicks of the foundation settling, the moan of the wooden beams yielding to a drop in barometric pressure. I do hope there’s no scurrying that could displease the Health Department.
There’s a different kind of creak behind me. I turn to find that a man is already inside—no surprise, though I left the door locked. When I see him, I have to fight back disappointment. He’s not the person I hoped would come. He’s dressed in a black gaucho hat and matching black shirt, slacks, and cape. He always dresses like a character in a Poniard video game. Last time I saw him, he went by the name of Banquo Nixon.
“Who are you this week?” I ask.
He bows and tips his hat with a flourish. “Call me Zorro Snowden, the Cyber Fox.” He lifts the hem of his cape to reveal a scabbard and a sabre, real no doubt. The man is a cosplayer, not a clown—a kind of performance artist who appears at comic-book and video-game conventions.
“You have something for me, Mr. Stern. At your service.”
I hand him the tape. “It’s the only one of its kind. I need to know what’s on it, as soon as possible. Sooner. I’ll owe you.”
“We already owe you, señor.” He bows.
“Before you go, can you tell me how—?”
He raises a hand. “We cannot speak of these things now. We are being watched. Possibly more than that.”
I’d believe the man insane, but I know from past experience that he isn’t. Not that way. “Who’s watching?”
“A woman parked in a blue Mercedes-Benz. She’s wearing sunglasses at midnight. Be careful, Mr. Stern.” He flicks the brim of his cap in good-bye and steals out the backdoor. I’m not sure why I gave him the tape. Even if he and his cohort are able to decipher what’s on it, they’re perfectly capable of releasing the damn thing as part of an online video game in which Ian Holzner is the villainous Big Boss.
I go out the front. Just as Zorro told me, there’s a blue Mercedes parked across the street. Melrose Avenue is empty—it always is this late at night—and the neighboring shops have been closed for at least an hour. The residential side street is forty yards away. If Mariko Heim wants me dead, now’s her chance, because we’re going to settle this no matter what happens. Few things make you braver than the decidedly un-Zen-like state of being fed up. I circle around to the driver’s side window and rap on it hard. It takes a long moment for her to roll it down.
“You could get hurt ambushing people like that,” she says matter-of-factly. Contrary to what Zorro told me, she’s not wearing sunglasses. Both hands are on the wheel. She’s looking straight ahead with eyes closed, like a fourteen-year-old on a joyride that’s gotten out of hand. There’s no one else in the car. I should be relieved by that, but her enforcers’ absence is out of the norm, and the abnormal serves as fecund ground for violence.
“You murdered Belinda Hayes and tried to kill Lovely Diamond and me,” I say with a sense of conviction I’ve held for weeks but suddenly don’t feel. “Hayes got caught in some Sanctified Assembly fatwa against me that—”
“If I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead. I don’t have any idea why you think I had anything to do with Hayes’s murder. You’re unimportant to me.”
“I saw you driving away from the scene.”
“I don’t know what you think you saw, but it wasn’t me.”
“I think this whole bombing campaign was orchestrated by the Sanctified Assembly.”
She nods her head in disdain. “There’s a saying we Assembly devotees have. ‘Things are always as they seem—but they’re not the truth.’” Still, she faces straight ahead; still, her eyes are closed.
“You think your prophet came up with those words?”
The only response is a slight pursing of her lips. It’s almost one in the morning, and the night has gone cold. The sky is pristine and starry because many of the city lights have dimmed. LA isn’t tropical, so the winter air slices through my dress shirt. Or maybe the ice comes from Mariko Heim’s hatred of me. “Quiana wrote those words. I saw her type them to put in Kelly’s mouth. As poor an actor as he was, her lines were so good they spoke for themselves. That’s not to say I’ve ever understood them.”
“Cooperate with me, Stern. Tell me what you know about the Assembly’s practice of Ascending Sodality. And your mother’s role in it.”
It’s my turn to play nonresponsive.
“You know what people are saying, Stern? They think you’re involved in this murder spree with Holzner. You’re his son, he’s been living with you, and now the private investigator working for you killed a key witness. Are you a misplaced sixties’ radical, Stern, born twenty years too late? Or are you just trying to please Daddy by following in his footsteps? What about your sister, Emily? Is she involved, too?”
I lean over and stick my head inside her window, my face inches from hers. “Leave us alone, Heim. Tell your followers to back off, too. Your treatment of Quiana is apostasy. You’re going to be excommunicated from your precious church if you’re not careful.”
She presses the button and starts the ignition. I barely jerk my head back before she speeds away. If I’d reacted a nanosecond slower, I might’ve been decapitated.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I get to court earlier than anyone but the courtroom deputy, who lets me inside. I sit at counsel table. Marilee Reddick will no doubt rest her case, and I’ll have to get up and defend Ian Holzner. But with what evidence, what arguments, what passion? I want to tell the jurors that he’s the father I never knew, that I deserve a chance to spend time with him no matter who he is, that he’s no longer the kind of man who’d harm another human being. But the only time I’d ever get to share those beliefs would be as a family member testifying during a death-penalty phase. So I start preparing the questions for my own witnesses, an exercise that feels like donning track shoes to begin a death march.
Five minutes later, the door opens, and Lou Frantz and Lovely Diamond walk in. I expect Frantz to take hi
s usual seat in the gallery, but he walks up to counsel table, opens his briefcase, pulls out a file, and plops down in the chair next to me. Lovely sits on his far side.
“No way, Frantz,” I say. “This is our case. Go sit in the gallery where you belong.”
“It’s my case, too, Stern,” he replies in his normal voice, which nevertheless projects so loudly that I’m sure the courtroom personnel can hear him without the aid of those invasive microphones. “This is why I was assigned as consulting counsel. A man’s life is at stake, and things are going poorly. Exceedingly poorly. I’m not about to sit back and let that continue without intervening.”
“It has nothing to do with my—our defense strategy.”
“Maybe so, but I’m sitting at the table today. If nothing else, it’ll wake the jury up.”
“What do you think about this?” I ask Lovely.
“I think . . .” She shuts her eyes tightly as if squeezing what she really wants to say out of her brain. “Let Lou sit at counsel table, Parker. See how it goes.”
When you love someone who’s left you once, any disagreement can seem like heartless rejection. I check the clock on the wall, will it to rewind backward three days to when Moses Dworsky was still alive, so I can stop him from going north to the prison. I will the clock to turn thirty-nine years back so that I can know the truth about the Playa Delta bombing, about my father, about myself. The second hand taunts me by sweeping ever forward. I go back to preparing my direct examination. If Frantz tries to get up and speak, he’ll have to fight me for the lectern.
The courtroom deputy opens the door to let the public inside. The spectators file in like mourners. Mariko Heim isn’t among them, fortunately. Emily sits in her usual place behind her father. She was crying all night—I heard her when I came home at two in the morning—but it’s not apparent. She has her shoulders back and her chin raised, a diminutive soldier marching into battle.
The marshals bring Holzner in, the shackles and jumpsuit unremarkable after so many days. At nine o’clock sharp, Judge Gibson calls the session to order, and the jurors file in. They haven’t been sequestered, but they have been instructed repeatedly not to watch the news, read the newspapers, search the Internet, or talk to anyone about the case. No matter—they undoubtedly know about Dworsky’s murder-suicide. None of them will look at me, except for that Joey character, who won’t take his eyes off me and actually smiles grimly, like an executioner certain of his righteousness.
As soon as Judge Gibson calls the session to order, Marilee Reddick says, “The government rests.”
I move to the lectern, and fortunately Frantz doesn’t try to wrestle it away from me. It’s not because he isn’t prepared to take over—he doesn’t need to be, just as a shark doesn’t require preparation to bite.
I call our own explosives expert, an ex-FBI forensics expert and current security consultant, who opines that someone other than Ian Holzner could’ve built the bomb that exploded at the Playa Delta VA so long as he or she had a scientific background or had learned from someone who did. On cross-examination, Reddick gets her to admit that she can’t identify any other American radical group before 1977 that built a bomb precisely the way that Holzner did. We were ready for that, and our witness is facile. On redirect she testifies that a member of Germany’s deadly Red Army Faction—also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group—constructed an almost-identical bomb used in a 1972 attack on a US military facility and that several American radicals had contact with the German radical group well before 1975.
When Lovely calls Father Ray Oliphant, a Catholic priest, college professor, and once-upon-a-time antiwar activist of the late 1960s, there’s a clank of chains. Holzner must recognize the name. But I don’t know for sure, because I’ve decided not to tell him anything more about our trial strategy. Irrespective of whether he’s guilty or innocent, I’m not going to take the risk that someone else ends up dead because of what he knows.
Father Oliphant has the priest’s collar but also a mountain-man beard and silver-white hair that reaches his shoulders. He’s wearing ratty jeans. He’s Lovely’s discovery, so she’s going to examine him. Unlike the last time she stood up to question a witness, there’s no lessening of tension, no infusion of energy. The very air in the room feels hostile. Half the jurors are frowning at her. Like all good trial lawyers, she behaves as if she’s in complete control and winning the case by miles.
She starts with Oliphant’s background. He’s now seventy-three, and like Craig Adamson, was a nonviolent civil-rights activist turned Vietnam War protestor. Unlike Adamson, he didn’t turn to violence after the war escalated but instead entered the priesthood. Since then, he’s spent his life opposing war and fighting poverty, maintaining that Jesus was the first practitioner of nonviolent protest.
“Did you know the defendant, Ian Holzner?” Lovely asks.
“I heard him speak several times in the early nineteen seventies and met him once in early nineteen seventy-five.”
“Under what circumstances?”
“As a Catholic. I was trying to convince the more radicalized faction of the antiwar movement to disavow violence as a way of ending the war. I believed I had credibility, because between nineteen sixty-nine and nineteen seventy-five I’d been arrested twenty-three times for civil disobedience in protest of government and corporate injustice. I’d suffered documented incidents of police brutality. I was able to arrange a meeting with Ian Holzner and Rachel O’Brien through a man named Charles Sedgwick.”
There are murmurs throughout the gallery, which is just on the serrated margin between restraint and bedlam. I try to gauge whether the jurors are confused or aware. All I detect from them is a detached weariness of people who’ve made up their minds long ago and just want it to be over.
“Where were you?” Lovely asks.
“At a party in Del Mar, California, at a private beach house. One of the children of the owners was interested in radical politics. A groupie of sorts. But she gave money. That was one irony of that era. Many well-to-do kids still enjoyed the trappings of wealth even as they railed against the capitalist system.”
“Did you discuss with Holzner and O’Brien the use of violence versus nonviolence as a tactic?”
“We got into quite a debate. O’Brien in particular didn’t want to hear from me. She quoted Marx that religion is the opiate of the people and added that nonviolence was just the syringe by which the fascist’s smack was administered. She said that Gandhi and Martin Luther King sodomized each other. When I replied that what she was saying was bullshit, she got so upset she threatened me.”
“Physically?”
“Yes.”
“What was Ian Holzner’s reaction?”
“He found someone who was smoking a marijuana joint, grabbed it out of the guy’s hand, insisted that O’Brien take a few hits, and told her to relax and have fun. Luckily, she walked away, but not before giving Holzner the finger and spitting in my face.”
“She literally spit at you?”
“She literally spit in my face.”
“What happened next?”
“Holzner found a napkin and wiped O’Brien’s saliva off my cheek. He apologized for her behavior. Then we started talking about the movement again, revolutionary tactics, philosophy. He said he disagreed with O’Brien, that he thought nonviolence had its place but only in a civilized society. He said that America had become a police state, no better than Nazi Germany. I tried to convince him that it was exactly the opposite, that if what he was saying were true, we’d both be dead. Then he said something surprising. He said he’d once believed what O’Brien believed, but then he’d gotten some girl pregnant, didn’t even know it, and she showed up with the child. It didn’t make him angry like he thought it would. It made him feel like a grown-up. Made him think about things.”
There’s another buzz in the courtroom, a kind of self-praise for putting together the obvious—Oliphant is talking about me. When Lovely told me about Oliphant, s
he didn’t reveal this part of his testimony, just said he was going to dump on Rachel O’Brien and make Holzner look good by comparison. Does she really think the jury is supposed to conclude that my father isn’t a murderer because he had a fleeting moment of paternal concern for the infant son he never wanted and later abandoned? And yet, as his son, that’s exactly what I conclude, and I find myself fighting off the cynical view that it’s just wishful thinking.
Oliphant’s testimony raises another question I’ve asked myself a thousand times: Why did Harriet give birth to me? After I was born, she had at least three abortions that I know of. There’s only one answer to that question: She loved Holzner. She never loved those other men. Does that mean she loved me as well?
“Why do you remember your conversation with Ian Holzner after all these years?” Lovely asks.
“Two reasons. The first is that Mr. Holzner was charged with the Playa Delta bombing not so long after, and he became a fugitive from justice. The second is what he said about his child. It was so unusual, because guys like Holzner didn’t talk about kids and family and all those trappings of bourgeois living. The guy’s own propaganda maintained that the nuclear family was a tool of capitalism to keep the masses down. The dude was changing. I’m a believer in redemption. I think that true revolutionary fervor—not the urge to do violence, but the desire to radically change the world order to help humanity—sets a person on the road to heaven. Ian Holzner’s motives were always noble, and his views were changing.”
After Lovely says that she has no further questions, Reddick stands and in less than two minutes of cross gets Oliphant to admit that, in the conversation, Holzner had expressly advocated violent protest and that he has no idea whether or not Holzner bombed the Playa Delta VA. Yet, when Oliphant stands down, I realize he’s the first witness in days who’s made Ian Holzner sound like a human being.
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